Travel

FreeGateGuru (for iPhone) is an app to pack. It will help you navigate airports, anticipate wait times, find the freshest food, and travel with greater confidence. Imagine this grim scene: You have a three-hour layover and the unenviable dining choice between the bloated cinnamon bun and a greasy sports bar. Which is less likely to inflict damage on your stomach lining? GateGuru can help you avoid the plight of past LaGuardia travelers with its user-submitted reviews of services in the airport. It also has airport maps and checkpoint wait times will spare you from extending your tenure.

FreeThe Hipmunk iPhone app, a spinoff of the Hipmunk website is a travel booking app for flights and hotels. What makes Hipmunk unique is it incorporates accommodation options from alternative sites such as Airbnb and HomeAway, two services that let homeowners rent out their private real estate by the day or week.

Free For getting a deal on car rentals, Hotwire's iPhone app is actually amazingly useful, as long as you don't mind knowing which company you'll end up using. The good news is, you're guaranteed to get one of the major players. Hotwire is also decent with hotel search and booking, especially at the last minute, which is when you'd probably be using it on your phone anyway. It doesn't include flights or package deals, but for deals on car rentals and hotels, it's a winner.

99 cents (free version also available) Travel booking site Kayak is a wonderful multi-purpose travel app, helping you find and purchase flights, hotels, car rentals, and more. While there is a free version of the Kayak iPhone app, the Pro version is worth the dollar if you're an avid traveler. One of the perks: detailed maps of more than 100 airports.

FreeThe free app and website MenuPages keeps a database of restaurant menus, with prices included. If you've ever gritted your teeth at a restaurant's online menu that omits the prices, try MenuPages for unbiased information. Admittedly, MenuPages is not a great app for every location, but in major U.S. cities, it's awesome, especially when Yelp's recommendations seem skewed by college students who give five-star ratings to fast-food burgers and less-than-fresh sushi. With MenuPages, you can make your own decisions about a restaurant's dishes and prices. The app and website won't give you much insight into quality, but it will help you quickly weed out places that are too pricey or don't serve the kind of food you have in mind. It's also useful for ordering take-out.

OpenTable

Free OpenTable has long been a choice service for making dinner reservations without picking up the phone, and with iOS 8 and any iPhone with TouchID (the fingerprint sensor), the iPhone app now has a whole bunch of new features. You can not only make a restaurant reservation, but also pay for your meal at the end of it using Apple Pay. The redesigned interface makes use of the iPhone 6 Plus' extra-large size, too.

Free Travel-confirmation emails always contain way more information than you actually need to get out the door and to the airport on time. One app that can help you get organized when it comes to travel is TripCase. It does 90 percent of the work of culling and collating travel confirmations into one itinerary, resulting in a clear overview of your trip in chronological order, with flight details, hotel addresses, car rental reservation numbers, and more. It's quite similar to TripIt (listed next), except in how you import your data into the travel app. In TripCase, you forward emails to a special address. With TripIt, the service automatically grabs travel information from your emails for you.

Free; optional Pro service $49 per year The TripIt iPhone app is a lightweight front end for a powerful itinerary organizer. TripIt finds travel confirmations in your email accounts and collates them into concise itineraries. TripIt is a bit heady-handed on trying to upsell you on the Pro service, but the free app is still an excellent itinerary organizer. The app's greatest strength is the ease with which it gathers your reservation information, which would be difficult to replicate even with a carefully curated series of email folders.

FreeThe most comprehensive review app, Yelp turns out to be an invaluable tool for finding businesses nearby, especially when you're in a town you don't know well. Yelp's mobile app has helped me find a hairdresser when I was in a pinch in Washington DC, and a suitable lunch while driving through Ohio (shout-out to Moreland Hills!). Need to find an acupuncturist in Austin? Or the most popular coffee shop in Charlotte (emphasis on "popular" and not necessarily "best," by the way)? Yelp's the app to do it.